Tuesday, October 9, 2012

"The Studio Audience"

Continuing my recent more sanguine approach to remembering
my career – wait!I’m not sure that’s
the right word – hold on while I look it up… Okay, “sanguine” – cheerfully optimistic; hopefully confident
– no, that’s not it.Maybe it’ll come to
me later.I was trying for something on the positive side of the
ledger, but “sanguine” is way too upbeat.I have never been “cheerfully optimistic” about anything.

But looking back, I would be remiss if I did not shine a
adulatory light of praise on the studio audiences that would make the effort to
come see our shows.Once, a contingent
of Marines made up about a third of
the audience for the Major Dad
pilot.It was unquestionably their enthusiastic
response that night that contributed to selling the series.So a big Oo-rah
to “The Few and the Proud.”

Okay, so hours before the filming (or, often in the old days,
the videotaping) of an episode, there would be a line of prospective audience
members snaking along the outside the
studio, waiting to get in.These are
regular people.The V.I.P’s and cast
invitees would be ushered in directly.

There were a couple of hundred seats in the gallery.The V.I.P. seats were taped off with masking
tape with the V.I.P’s names printed on them.Many of these seats were invariably still empty at show time, and were
then filled with “nobodies.”Thank you, “nobodies”,
for actually showing up.

Sometimes, the gallery would be fully occupied, and even
though you’d waited, possibly for hours, you still didn’t get in.The studio always distributed more tickets
than available seats, in case some people decided to imitate the V.I.P’s and say they’d be coming, and then not.The studio was unwilling to take chances on a
not-full “house”, so they regularly overbooked the seating, knowing that when
tickets are free, sometimes people will not bother to use them. Or they do
use them, but it’s to pry stuck spinach out from between their teeth.

What I’ve been discussing so far is shows people wanted to see, which meant shows familiar
to the audience, because they were already on the air.With new
shows, especially new shows with no recognizable stars in them, it is
considerably harder to fill the seats.Professional companies must be contracted to wrangle audiences for such
shows.The results of these efforts,
unfortunately, vary.

More than once I’ve had audiences bused in from Senior
Homes.I have nothing against Seniors –
I happen to be one myself – but many Senior Homes, like Sorority Houses, have
curfews, and there were occasions when, at a specified time, the Seniors were
required to get up and leave, even though the filming had not yet been
completed.The Seniors would be very
apologetic, but, they would explain, their hands were tied.You got on the bus, or
you missed your ride home.

Besides the long waits outside, often in winter downpours,
studio audiences also had to endure being crowded into rows of seats, often
without backs, having their views blocked by the cameras (this was before the
technology had advanced to provide viewing via overhead monitors), and suffering
through extended filming sessions, that, for technical reasons or actors who
would keep forgetting their lines, could drag on for hours.

In my view, the audiences who put up with these difficulties
were heroes.Necessary heroes.Audience
laughter energized the actors, motivating them to bring their “best game” to
the proceedings.You could feel the
audience’s encouragement giving the actors a lift.As a Warm-up Man, I would never forget to
remind them how important they were. In
basketball parlance, the audience was our indispensible “Sixth Man.”

(I once did a show without
an audience called Family Man.The actors never knew if what they were doing
was working.Later, when we screened two
completed shows in front of a live audience, the episodes were rapturously received.Unfortunately, there is no such thing as
energizing actors retroactively.)

(I also informed the audience that a sparsity of laughter on
their part would trigger the need for a supplementing “laugh track”, and that
that “laugh track” had been recorded decades earlier during an episode of I Love Lucy.This meant that many of the people cackling
away on the “laugh track” were currently no longer with us.I informed the
audience that if they did not want to risk making some viewers at home sad when
they caught the sound of their dead relatives laughing on television, they
should make sure to react loudly enough, so that the addition of the “laugh
track” would not be necessary.)

The audiences that attended the shows I worked on were generally wonderful.It was almost as if they had a personal
investment in the show they had come to see, like the show was, somehow, family.If the show was already a hit, the studio
audience would often laugh much louder than many of the jokes deserved,
rewarding the show for its overall success (if not for the success of that
particular joke.)If it was a fledgling show trying to make it, the
audience treated it like a lost puppy, clutching it to their collective bosoms,
and nurturing it to health and vitality until – as in cases like Cheers, which, during its first season,
ranked last in the ratings – it finally gained strength, and could make it on
its own.

Sometimes, for various reasons, a joke needed to be
reshot.In such cases, the audience was always
encouraged to laugh as hard as they had the first time.They didn’t.Very often, they laughed harder.And if the joke had to be reshot a third
time, they laughed harder still.You’d
never imagine an audience of “civilians” being biz troupers, but that’s exactly
what they were.They’d do whatever it
took to help the show.

On the “down” side, the audience consistently laughed the
loudest at sex jokes, or more accurately, sex innuendo jokes.I hate those
jokes.Even though, sometimes, I allowed
them, because they work.Still, every
time the audience went nuts, I would always turn my head up to the chortling
galleryites and say, “Shame on you!”(It
occurred to me just now that I was actually speaking to myself.)

Studio audiences were also the dutiful products of decades
of conditioning; you crossed their expectations and you mercilessly paid the
price.I once wrote a script where the
adult star of the show was defeated in a tense chess match against a precocious
twelve year-old boy, and the studio audience, as one, went “Awww.”I
wanted the kid to beat the star; the audience
wanted the star to beat the kid.The
audience won, and I went home that night with a stinging “Awww” ringing in my
ears.

This last observation is in no way their fault, but because of
their presence, the success or failure of the filmed episode was judged
entirely by the studio audience’s reaction.The result was a focusing more on the two hundred people in the studio
audience, rather than the tens of millions watching at home.

It is, I don’t know, a chemically different experience watching
a show when you’re actually there than it is watching the same show sitting in
your living room.There are certain
kinds of jokes, or moments, that explode when you’re in the arena where they’re
taking place, while, at home, the reaction to the same material is ho-hum.Also, studio audiences – especially those
without the benefit of monitors to watch the close-ups – do not respond enthusiastically
to subtlety.

That’s why the jokes written for
“audience” shows (The Big Bang Theory,
Two Broke Girls, for example) are
punchline “hard”, while the writing for “non-audience” shows (Modern Family, Parks and Recreation) are more quiet and nuanced.(Not being a natural joke writer, I might
actually have done better with the current formats.If I were fluent with the references.)

A live audience was a mixed
blessing.It adrenalized the performers,
but it influenced, not always in a good way, the way you were required to write.Still, I felt a visceral thrill when the
audience started filing in.And I was especially grateful when they stayed
till the end.

Had I not been working on them, in
some cases at least, I am not sure I would not have taken off with the Seniors.

Sorry, I never did come up with what I really meant when I said I had recently become
more “sanguine” about my career.But
that’s what’s great about blog writing.You get another shot at it tomorrow.